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‘Daddy, Read for Me’

STORY TIME José Rosado, 42, visiting with his sons at Rikers Island, top. Below, Mr. Rosado picking books and recording himself reading for the boys.Credit
Todd Heisler/The New York Times

THERE once was a man who read an unabridged dictionary from cover to cover to keep from losing his mind. Solitary confinement can do that to you, make you read what you would never look at on the outside, and then read more and more of it, to preserve your sense of humanity, maybe, but certainly to maintain whatever flimsy connection you hold to the world beyond your prison cell.

The other choice was to go crazy, or at least that was how it felt to José Rosado, or José Rosaldo, or José Reyes; his identity varies based on his crime and conviction. Mr. Rosado, 42, is a scraggy recovering addict with a 10th-grade education halfway through an eight-month stint on Rikers Island.

Mr. Rosado, known around the jailhouse as “professor,” has a wife, three sons and 52 books waiting for him in a public-housing project in East New York, Brooklyn. The books have been his anchor, he said, grounding him not to reality, but to distant times, faraway places and magical corners of his imagination, where heroin does not command him to do the bad things he has done.

For nearly a decade, Mr. Rosado has often spent 23 hours a day alone in a cell in the criminal justice system’s equivalent of “time out.” That was where he read — about Freemasonry and kabbalah, about ancient history, anthropology and archaeology. He has read the Bible and the Koran — “the whole 114 suras,” or chapters, he said, “from Al-Fatiha to Al-Nas,” the first and the last.

It did not keep Mr. Rosado out of Bare Hill, Clinton, Southport and Attica — prisons across New York State, far from his home in Brooklyn. He has been in and out since 1989, for burglary and drugs and, most recently, third-degree assault, often extending his stints with bad behavior: his prison disciplinary record runs for six pages.

These days, Mr. Rosado is reading “Fox in Socks” and “Hop on Pop” and “Clifford y la Hora del Baño.” Juan Camacho, 35, a drug dealer and father of two, is partial to “The Cat in the Hat” (though he says he did not like the movie as much because “it doesn’t have the same rhyming, the classic of it”). And Qaaid Reddick, 27, who has never met his third daughter because she was born while he was behind bars on a weapons charge, is paging through “Merry Christmas, Curious George.”

They are three of the eight men at the Eric M. Taylor Center — one of nine jails on Rikers Island — who completed a five-week literacy course this fall called “Daddy and Me,” in which they recorded themselves reading children’s books for the sons and daughters they had left behind. It was the first time such a program had been tried at Rikers, though there have been many similar efforts, most focusing on female inmates in prisons across the country, since at least 1996.

“People are multidimensional,” said Dora B. Schriro, the city’s Correction Department commissioner. “Part of being a man is being a dad, and part of being a good man is being a good dad, in the most fundamental sense of the word.”

Financed with about $3,800 from a family literacy grant from the state, the program at the Taylor Center was run by Nick Higgins, supervising librarian at the New York Public Library’s correctional services program. On the first day, Mr. Higgins told the inmates, “Our objective is to hopefully change the attitude that some of you might have about reading to children, that reading is Mom’s job.”

Over five weeks, Mr. Rosado learned to calibrate his raspy voice to a higher pitch. Mr. Camacho learned to contort his facial muscles into humorous expressions. Mr. Reddick, on the back end of his sixth stay at Rikers since 2005, rediscovered “The Little Engine That Could,” a book he remembered reading in elementary school.

THE inmates — in olive-green jumpsuits that seemed too big for their frames, with the names of their mothers, girlfriends and children tattooed on their skin — had a long table of children’s books from which to choose: “Goodnight Moon,” “The Itsy Bitsy Spider,” “El Zorrito.”

“I like monkeys,” Mr. Reddick said as he got acquainted with Curious George. “They’re the closest thing to a human being.”

As a child, Mr. Reddick lived on East 92nd Street in Manhattan, near a Presbyterian church that had a strawberry shortcake festival he never missed. He said he was arrested for the first time at age 14 for punching a boy who had disrespected him. Since then, he has been in and out of prison, mostly for assault; on May 29, he was arrested on Staten Island with a gun in his backpack. When asked where he grew up, Mr. Reddick said, “Right here,” meaning Rikers. He has three daughters: Mary Jane is 4, Ma’Naiya is 3, and Mya was born on Oct. 18. He was looking forward to the celebration at the end of the reading program, when children would visit their fathers and get the CDs the men had recorded on a Marantz PMD660, because it would be the first time he would see the baby.

At the first session, Mr. Reddick tried reading in front of the group, but was barely audible. “See the man in the yellow hat at the — ” He stopped midsentence and stuck out his tongue. “I misspoke,” he said sheepishly. At the third session, he read the book until the end, but with no inflection in his voice, as if he had been forced into it. By the next week, when it was time to record, he had abandoned the little monkey for the little engine he recalled from his childhood: I think I can, I think I can.

That was for Mary Jane. For Ma’Naiya, he chose “Papa, Do You Love Me?”, a modern story inspired by the Masai tribe in Kenya. Mr. Reddick had never heard of the book, but he liked the title. He did not select a story for Mya.

“Mya is too little for books,” Mr. Reddick said.

On the program’s fifth and final session, last month, Mr. Reddick and the others were escorted to the jail’s visiting room. Each of them commanded a set of colorful chairs arranged in a circle to welcome their families. Mr. Reddick sat among the red and green chairs, waiting. He watched as the other inmates hugged their babies and their babies’ mothers. He listened to them read their stories.

A girl laughed heartily as her father tickled her belly. A woman asked one of the correction officers if her daughter could have another cup of juice. The officer told her she did not have to ask; the juice and doughnuts had been laid out for the families.

Mr. Reddick sat alone for some time, staring at the CDs and books on the table before him, then staring into nothing. Eventually, he joined two other inmates whose families had not come either. They chatted, their backs turned to the men whose families were there.

He knew Mary Jane and Ma’Naiya would not be coming; they live on Staten Island with his sister, who, he said, thinks they should not see their father in jail. But he had expected Baby Mya. Later, he learned that her mother had woken up too late to catch the bus.

“No promises made, no promises broken,” Mr. Reddick shrugged.

MR. CAMACHO said he had a lot of children’s books in the apartment in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx, where his wife, Jasmine Bosch, lives with their two boys, José, 8, and Steven, 4; two dogs; and a cat named Tiger. But none were visible on a visit to the first-floor one-bedroom apartment one rainy afternoon. Ms. Bosch, who is 27 and unemployed, said that there were some, in a bin somewhere in the boys’ closet, but that she had no time to read them.

Ms. Bosch said that she woke up at 6:30 a.m. and that by 7, she and the boys would already be fighting. She fights to rouse José, to get him ready and out the door to get to school on time. She fights to keep Steven under control as she rushes to get breakfast.

Sometimes, cockroaches emerge from under the kitchen cabinets and crawl onto the table. Ms. Bosch said that she had gotten used to the roaches, but that she did not like the mice. That’s why she got Tiger. Tiger likes to eat cockroaches, too.

The apartment smells like stale cigarettes. Ms. Bosch smokes Newports, which she buys by the carton in New Jersey. She said she tried not to smoke in front of the boys, and also not to cry.

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While José and Steven are in school, Ms. Bosch said, she washes and folds, cooks and cleans, feeds Tiger and walks the dogs, one of whom is an old mutt who is half-blind and tends to crash into everything.

Ms. Bosch is dyslexic. She cannot read to the boys unless it is an easy book. José is dyslexic, too, “or something like that,” she said. “He needs help when he brings homework home.”

It was Mr. Camacho who taught the boys to write their names. Steven traced his four times that rainy afternoon. “Homework,” he said, waving the sheet of paper over his head.

During the Daddy and Me sessions, Mr. Camacho stumbled over the silly singsong of “The Cat in the Hat,” at one point saying, “I can already imagine José giggling.” Then, he said he hoped the boys would not be afraid of making mistakes, but would learn from them and not repeat them.

At the final session, he told José, who is 4-foot-11 and weighs 120 pounds, to eat more fruit. Then, before his family walked away, he grabbed the boy by the arm and said, “When you hear my voice, remember that daddy is there with you.”

Mr. Camacho has been at Rikers since June. The police had found 56 bags of crack cocaine in the pocket of a jacket in a hallway closet in his home, along with a marijuana pipe and five .38 Special bullets. Ms. Bosch kept track of the days until his scheduled Dec. 15 release on a calendar taped to the wall.

Instead, on Nov. 17, Mr. Camacho was transferred to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan, to face federal drug conspiracy charges that carry a minimum sentence of 10 years.

A federal indictment said Mr. Camacho — or “Papito Camacho,” as he is known on the streets — had sold a dozen bags of crack to an undercover police officer near his home on Manida Street, part of an enterprise that involved 12 others.

IN the recording room, Mr. Rosado pronounced Seuss as “Zeus” and read the words of “Fox in Socks” as if he were singing a rap song. “This-is-what-they-CALL-a-TWEET-le-BEE-tle-NOO-dle-POO-dle-BOT-tled-PAD-dled-MUD-dled-DUD-dled-FUD-dled-WUD-dled-FOX-IN-SOCKS-sir!”

He turned the page.

“There goes that little girl you like,” he said into the microphone, his eyes on one of the book’s characters, Sue, with her wavy hair and lips locked in a perpetual frown.

He was speaking to a child who was not there: Karabalí, 7, his eldest, who was named for a character in a Puerto Rican legend Mr. Rosado once read in prison, a runaway slave who eluded his captors even after his death. His second son, Cofresí, 6, is named after a 19th-century Puerto Rican pirate who robbed ships carrying gold from the island. The third is José, who is 5 and named for his father, a Puerto Rican who has a long rap sheet filled with heroin and burglary convictions.

Mr. Rosado bought his first book out of a prison catalog, in 1994, after he was ordered to spend 365 days in isolation for slashing another inmate. It was Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, and it cost $99, he said.

Later, he read Sun Tzu’s “Art of War,” which dissected military operations written more than 2,000 years ago. He read Robert Temple’s “Sirius Mystery,” which explored extraterrestrial beginnings of the human civilization. He read National Geographic’s “Lost Kingdoms of the Maya” and Henry Brun’s “Global Studies: Civilizations of the Past and Present,” which is more commonly assigned to teenagers in high school.

He met his wife, Olguita, after he came out of state prison in 2002 and moved to Orlando, Fla., where he found work building cabinets for a cousin’s small construction business. The housing market was booming, and for four years, he said, he made money and walked the line.

But when the housing market crumbled and work dried up, Mr. Rosado started getting high again. He tried to escape to Brooklyn, where he toiled as a tile maker for two years, but the company folded as the economy sputtered. On Aug. 17 , he was caught robbing a deli near his home. “We have cellphone, cable, house phone,” Mr. Rosado said, ticking off bills by way of explanation. “We have children, and we want them to eat nice, to dress up nice. I just got caught up. Did what I had to do.”

He got to Rikers a few days later and is scheduled for release on April 11.

“Block everything out, take a deep breath and pretend you’re reading to them,” Mr. Rosado mumbled to himself as he headed to the Daddy and Me recording room one Thursday morning.

Sometimes, he closed his eyes and broke from the text to address his sons. He apologized to Karabalí for stumbling on Dr. Seuss’s tongue-twisting rhymes. He reminded Cofresí about Timbuktu, “home of the ancient African civilizations,” after coming across the name in “Hop on Pop.”

“The book is bilingual,” he explained to little José about Clifford.

“You know English and Spanish, Papi, so when I talk to you in Spanish, you answer in Spanish, and when I talk to you in English, you answer in English.”

“Papi,” he added, “I love you. I’ll see you soon.”

Soon was a week later, in that visiting room with the brightly colored chairs. Cofresí told his father about the day someone fired a gun right outside their apartment door just a minute after he and his mother had stepped inside. Sitting on his mother’s lap, José read the English and Spanish words in the Clifford book.

On one side of the room was a bookcase full of children’s stories. Karabalí had raced to it almost as soon as he had arrived, grabbed one of the books and demanded, in a way that only a child can: “Daddy, read for me.”

A version of this article appears in print on December 26, 2010, on Page MB1 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘Daddy, Read for Me’. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe